I eat it with my hands, and always have. I’m afraid the toppings will slop over and fall off if I use a knife and fork.
That sounds like a good idea. I may try it in the future.
Deep dish, or lots of toppings, giant pieces, or really greasy - then I’ll use a fork. Otherwise I pick it up.
This. And the same applies to cheeseburgers or any other “hand food” that is too big and sloppy to pick up.
I will sometimes use a knife and fork when eating pizza in the living room while watching TV. Otherwise, you get pizza grease and crumbs all over the TV remote.
I feel a bit of sympathy for that turd DeBlasio, at least if the pizza in question was typical oily drippy greasy New York pizza. The stuff we used to buy at Pal Joey’s (our local pizza dive) was so oily, you could eat the pizza and then use what dripped on the box to lube your car.
Take-out pizza? Homemade pizza? Inside a pizza restaurant like Round Table? No.
An Italian restaurant? Yes.
Restaurant pizzas (i.e., in a proper sit-down Italian restaurant) are often better suited to eating with a knife and fork; either due to their structural stability, the amount of toppings, or both. And I grew up with Naval Etiquette, where picking up food was frowned upon. (Anecdote: Manners Mavens will say that it’s OK to pick up fowl to eat it. My dad related a story when I was little about a tradition where the officers would have a Dinner once a month to which wives were invited. And by ‘invited’, I mean ‘expected to attend’. One of the wives had grown up eating chicken with her fingers, and every month the dinner was fried chicken. Apparently she had a devil of a time eating it with a knife and fork.)
FWIW, the SO thinks I’m weird because I eat french fries with a fork when we eat out. She also thinks it’s strange that I eat my bacon with a fork. (I only have bacon at home.)
As I’ve said in more than one thread, I don’t recall ever using a fork to eat pizza in mumblety-many years in California. California pizza, even when it’s a regional variation like Chicago, tends to be firm and dry (at least, underneath) and not a sloppy, gooey mess.
We moved here and I don’t think I’ve eaten more than one or two slices with my hands. In step with other New England cooking, pizza here tends to be doughy, soft, and nearly as wet as lasagna. Even if you get a piece with a reasonably firm crust (there’s always one in every pan), the toppings are so sloppy-wet they run over the edges. Maybe I’m just prissy, but I don’t like getting food all over my hands no matter how big a pile of napkins the place provides.
What’s more, we end up eating wings with a knife and fork for the same reason. I like my wings fairly dry, with the coating cooked on, so that you can eat them with only a little mess. About half the restaurants here slather nearly-liquid good all over a batch of deep-fried wings (and then tend to undercook them a little, more like dinner chicken than snack chicken), so you end up looking like Joe-Bob on BBQ day after trying to eat one.
I guess I understand the blandness and sweetness of NE food. I don’t understand the messiness.
I often eschew any type of utensil…I just roll the whole pizza up and eat it like a gigantic burrito. (not really)
My favorite pizza place (Ledo’s, in Adelphi, MD) makes rectangular pizzas. They cut it so that some slices have no crust. You have to eat those with a fork and knife, or risk getting burned by hot sauce or cheese dripping on your fingers.
When pizza was a staple at my high school cafeteria, the practice was to buy two slices and eat them like a sandwich.
I usually eat it by hand, especially if it’s a simple pie with only a couple of toppings. But if it’s heavily overloaded with toppings, it may be necessary to use a knife and fork to avoid making an enormous mess. Sometimes it may also be too hot to pick up, and I’m too impatient to wait until it cools off enough.
If using utensils means not getting hot cheese and toppings in my lap, I use utensils.
Big, wet or deep dish are eaten with hardware. Otherwise, it’s hand food.
Like everyone else, I use a knife and fork for deep-dish and most garbage pizzas (those with an inordinate amount of toppings).
FWIW, Italians fold slices of thin-crust pizza like sandwiches, so the toppings don’t slide off. They don’t use knives and forks to eat them.*
*At least not that I observed when I was in Italy.
At least 99% of the time I just eat pizza by hand. The only exception would be lots of toppings on a very thin crust. Or if I’m in Paris, where it’s a faux pas to eat with your hands.
Most people who eat pizza probably don’t eat “real pizza,” By “real pizza,” I mean pizza that is meant to eaten by hand while walking down the street.
Pizzas that are more like some sort of actual pie, I guess it makes sense to use a fork.
In Ohio, a lot of places cut them like that. I don’t really consider it pizza, but I go along with my family. I don’t use utensils for the non-crust pieces. I just hold it with fingers under the crust.
I always eat my za with utensils. I’m not a barbarian.
When I’m eating “real” pizza, and by that I mean pizza that exists in reality, my decision about weather or not to use utensils depends solely upon the temperature of the pizza.
If I happen to be eating and walking down the sidewalk at the same time… yeah, no fork.
I have, occasionally, because the pizza was too soggy to eat by hand, or it was a frozen pizza and was dropped, breaking the crust into pieces that I can’t hold.
If it’s a flaccid pizza, I’ll cut the top third and eat it with a fork and then hand-eat the rest. I hate eating a tip-pointing-down slice.